“Of course, this is very good. We need to bring compassion into business; compassion is the best motivation for any activity in the world. It benefits others as well as yourself, including your business”.

While forthcoming on other humanitarian and environmental issues, the Dalai Lama rarely speaks directly on the topics of business, leadership and economics.

Note: this article is part of The Transatlantic Debate Blog series, which forms a conversation between Dr. Katrin Muff and Dr. Kathy Miller Perkins on business sustainability. Read the previous post here.

In this blog, I will highlight three different levels of change: 1) at the personal level where change is about changing oneself, 2) at the organizational level where we have a variety of tools to accomplish change as a group, and 3) at the societal level, where we urgently need to understand how to bring awareness to those occupying positions that we consider dangerous (illustrative events being the U.S. elections and the “Brexit” referendum) so that “they change”. More specifically, I will investigate behavioral change. Behavioral broadly relates to anything people do, or as Odgen Lindsley defined it so nicely with his “dead man test”: if a dead man can do it, it is not behavior. Continue reading →